Passage to the India Club

September 23, 2019October 6, 2019 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

A review of The India Club on London’s Strand

It’s easy, as you walk down the Strand, to be fooled by the enormous Edwardian facades and the sweep of Alwdych’s crescent, into thinking you are in London. Don’t be. You are somewhere in India, of course, and it’s shortly after 1950 and Krishna Menon, India’s first High Commissioner, Prime Minister Nehru and Lady Mountbatten have just agreed the menu – everything you’d expect, good decent, honest dhosas, something for everyone, everyone welcome.

We were walking along, past Kings College’s wide, depressing 1970s glass, I was looking for a large sign, a window, an entrance, a door and all I saw was a discrete little black board, as inconspicuous as possible. Next to it, on our right, was a shiny fuchsia linoleum staircase – slightly surprised at our being there but happy to show us up, none the less.

After this point, the year 2019 becomes indistinct, like an old polaroid left out on a hot park-bench, and everything goes a little bit orange, a little bit warm and blurry and you start to breathe the air of the Raj, a past that seems to have kept it’s door open at 143 The Strand – everything forgiven, open and yet only for the lucky ones who see the blackboard and trust the tangerine stairs – the way up to a secret realm, like platform 9 and three quarters at Kings Cross.

Will self observes: “The India Club is beautifully old-fashioned – and not like an Indian restaurant in 1950s Britain, for there were hardly any of those, but like one in 1950s India. ” I disagree, it is not like 1950s India, it is 1950s India, I know, I have been there, I have been to the India Club.

Enough said – let’s look around, explore this rare corner of Time that has escaped Death, for now. Let’s get a move-on in case the bell strikes midnight and all we find is another empty Pizza Express next to the empty one that’s next door.

Time for some mughlai chicken

And so, to the bustling upstairs restaurant. During the day, you can look out through the sash windows onto the Strand at lunchtime, but at night, you are thoroughly protected from 2019 London, the formica tables seem close and more glossy and the yellow walls warmer and more magical.

This is a Bistro, in the true sense of the word – fast and tasty. Within 20 minutes of ordering our Mughlai chicken and Bhuna lamb with saag dhal, okra, coconut rice, naan and of course popadoms with mango chutney and onion slices – it was there, quickly, with no ceremony, a smile and an answer to my father’s question:

‘How do you make okra at home?’ – to which our white-coated waiter-cook replied – ‘Simple, boil for 4 minutes, add salt and mustard oil, stir and it’s even better if you stir it and smash it like a mashed potato’.

Time-out gives it 4 stars and I whole-stomachly agree. I get the sense that, much like the formica tables, the flavours haven’t changed. And if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

And thank Shiva the Club has evaded various attempts to ‘bring it up to date’, as William Gould a professor of Indian history at the University of Leeds, who helped to get the Club a “listed building” status. “We are extremely pleased… the Club shouldn’t just be seen as the site of a connection to the Indian League but that it is also of significant cultural importance to the area, and the South Asian community of this country as a whole, and beyond that. ” Indeed the founder of Cobra beer himself Shashi Tharoor, among 26,000 others, is a patron and comrade in the war to save this modest haven of 20th century good will.

What you can eat – menu
Where you can chill – Bar and lounge
And you can live the dream for as little as £28 a night – accommodation

“Give me your hands if we be friends”

September 16, 2019November 15, 2019 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

Review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Globe,

And so I’m wafted along the ‘Wobbly Bridge’ with London twinkling all around me, a round dream the size of a globe. Tonight’s production has me under its spell, that feeling of complete helpless joy, the stuff of carnival and bacchanal, so loud and yet so soft. I’ll go anywhere, believe any trick now, after all life is but a dream…

This year’s production of MSND at the Globe Theatre is a carnival themed beam of joy that should light up every heart on the planet. It passed the Globe’s acid test – made standing, for 3 hours not only bearable but thoroughly enjoyable, for we hundreds of ‘groundlings‘ from the four corners of the real globe. It made us all feel newly alive and happy to be in the company of this pop-legend play, as if we’d all been drugged by Puck, Shakespeare’s most mischievous fairy. And he only charges a fiver for a trip!

As Michelle Terry, the Artistic Director says, “Let’s reimagine what is possible when individuals come together across difference, in a shared space, a shared light, a shared experience”.

And indeed we did. Thanks to Jim Fortune’s ebullient score for the Hackney Colliery brass band and various other playful tricks:

The ‘Moonshine-Lamp’ was supplied by a real, live, tipsy audience member
Puck was a part shared by the whole cast, darting among us in ‘PUCK’-labelled Tees
Master Quince, the director of the am. dram play-within-the-play, was an MC, DJ complete with carnival float.

We feel like anything could happen; indeed, we might suddenly find ourselves onstage or falling in love with the person in front of us and out of love with our supposedly ‘real’ lover.

MSND was written over the same two years that Shakespeare wrote both Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost. And so, during this period, we see him lead us into Love’s labyrinth of dramatic possibility, from farce to tragedy, with MSND a trippy sleep, somewhere deep in a daze between the two

The text was jerked up with improv that shouldn’t work but does, marvellously. A handful of people left, maybe they were tourists or purists who’d come to see men in tights pretending to be Tudors, “Shame on them” I hear Shakespeare tut, this is how it’s meant to feel – lost in the woods, the magical psychedelia that panic brings, the uncontrollable fits of fantasy, the rabbit holes that our waking brains close off – This is Theatre, and tonight it drew us in, showed us ourselves, yet again, in a new form: unimaginable, fantastical, farcical, ridiculous even, but somehow real and true and totally disarming, totally free from gender, race, sexuality – rainbow upon rainbow of sound and word and dance. As the inimitable Bottom says:

“I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what the dream was. Man is an ass if he go about to expound this dream”.

Bottom on the left and Titania on the right

And so, if you are a half-assed critic/punter who sniffs and questions all sorts of things, like the fact that we were all asked to sing “Dancing in the moonlight” and there were jokes about Jamaica, and all sorts of ‘woke’ extras where added – know that this is exactly how the play was performed in Shakespeare’s day and for centuries after.

Indeed, shortly after the first production, it was put on as an opera and was later reshaped for 18th century ears by Mendelssohn. And so it’s right and proper for the sound-track to be what we are listening to now – The play is nothing if not eccentric, new, Avant-Guard, decidedly ‘outre’, with two cheeky fairy fingers up to the rules. Indeed, after one of the earliest productions the chief producer was put in the stocks wearing Bottom’s ass’s head because it was judged ‘too bawdy and licentious’.

This play will survive being sliced up and reassembled in whatever parts we need at any given point in time. It will always retain its integrity, as if by magic – anything goes except the boring and the unimaginative – these two are unforgivable and must be avoided at all costs.

I would say, however, that it was all light and no darkness, that dark madness that the play is capable of, as we’ve seen in this year’s somewhat flat, though eery, production in Regent’s Park, and the Young Vic’s austere 2017 production , where the stage was mud and the fairies tramps:

But maybe this focus on the bright and jolly interpretation is because we need a lift, we need an antidote to bad news, we need some reasons to be cheerful.

Although light was the major note, we had just enough darkness to keep us grounded, with the added African magic spells and Mardi Gras threads. These chime with the historical and contemporary use of this play as a tool for defiance, put on by oppressed cultures, in challenging circumstances –

First Nations oppressed in America, Polish Jews in Auschwitz, Black South Africans during Apartheid and, more recently, Australian Aboriginals as part of the landmark Festival of Dreaming in 1997.

And now, in these days of climate change and climate strikes, the play reveals a new depth – Titania’s speech about nature being topsy-turvy – this was the moment, the passage or two in every Shakespeare play, that speaks directly to you, in your exact moment in time, and we are in 2019, when ‘toxic odours’ do indeed pervade our globe and the weather is too inconsistent to say if it’s winter or spring:

“The spring, the summer The chiding autumn, angry winter change

Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,

By their increase, knows not which us which.”

The harvest at the time Shakespeare was writing had been one of the worst in living Elizabethan memory, and, in those times, a bad harvest meant grinding hardship, hunger and general wretchedness through the winter and beyond.

[Illumination from ‘Hours of Henry VIII’ (c. 1500), The Morgan Library & Museum, MS H.8, fol. 3v.]

And so, as we have now managed to wreak on ourselves, “a progeny of evils”, we can perhaps share at least the feeling of vulnerability and dread, as 21st century Extinction Rebellion Elizabethans, that the original hungry and dejected audience must have had when they heard these lines than any other generation.

The rest of the performances seem to have come and gone, as a fantastical bopping dream, with perhaps the liveliest, most charming MSND lovers the globe has seen. Helena and Hermia’s catty face-off was truly brilliant and realistic. There can be a tendency for these two to be wedge parts, propping up the others, but here they shone out, front and centre.

If the play was a glittering carnival float, we were on it, with them – friends welcomed into their clap-along, ding-a-ling, sing along good time.

This was a spectacle of unapologetic panto, of irresistible misrule, where a bright flower-crusted turquoise bin serves as a bower fit for Her Majesty, Titania. And who knows? Our glittery Faery Queene might invite us in for a wee cuddle and a sprinkle?

There was a nod to Peter Hall’s ground-breaking, sell-out ground-breaking production,

where Judy Dench’s Titania, queen of the fairies was dressed as the 16^th century Queen Elizabeth II. In this Globe production we see Titania a panto version of Hippolyta, her alter ego-Queen of Athens: dressed as our very own hunting shooting fishing, Queen Elizabeth, dragging a newly shot Balmoral stag across the stage as Theseus, her husband – camp and pink in his Duke of Edinburgh army regalia, and even camper and OTTer as his alter ego, Oberon, king of the fairies – one of the most fluffy and flippant Oberons we’ve ever seen, jollies us along, giving the impression that he’s an old sport in a care-home – somewhat ‘away with the fairies’.

All this and somehow, respectfully. I must say, however that some of the lines were lost in the daze of bright colours and music, that the poetry inherent in the lines was sometimes overdressed and bloated by the excesses of this modern production. As the Guardian’s review notes, ‘You get the sense of wired teenagers needing to sleep off a particularly wild weekend.’

That said, I looked up at the stars and at my fellow trippers and thought “We are laughing, We are actually giggling from tingling knees up, standing here, laugh-sway-whistling along…”

And so were they, probably, 500 years ago, at this play, and then, like us, they left the brightness of their piqued imaginations and returned to the grey world of frowns and people who aren’t dreamers or dreaming, who haven’t been drugged by buzzy bee Pucks. The central line was a massive come down. Time to go, go back to sleep….

A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs at the Globe Theatre until the 13th October 2019.

Book your trip here
If you’re new to Shakespeare or MDSND and you’re wondering what the Puck this is all about – I’d thoroughly recommend the Arden Shakespeare version

Find out more about life in Elizabethan England:

Once upon a time in Hollywood….

August 23, 2019August 25, 2019 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

..is a fable told by the Homer of modern cinema, Quentin Tarantino. With a pantheon of Hollywood gods, heroes and harpies, he weaves a dreamlike tapestry in vivid, acid-dipped tangerine, chocolate, fuchsia and blue, bringing it home with the blood red signature we have come to expect from all things Tarantinoed.
It’s as perfect a vehicle for Brad and Leo as you’ll see. Two actors, perfectly balanced on either side of a ’66 cream Cadillac. They reel you in, you are totally thrilled that they let you hitch their ride. You are safe with them, they tell a good story.

Brad keeps everything on the road with his cheeky charm and rusty biceps. Leo draws you in, fools you, again, into thinking he was born to play this part and only this part, forget Gilbert Grape, Romeo, The Great Gatsby or Wolf on Wall Street, this is the one. He is the not-so-has-been cowboy actor Rick Dalton, the fictitious star of TV western ‘Bounty’ that Quentin wants him to be. The year is 1969. It’s summertime, “The goddam hippies are everywhere”, and they’re higher and darker than they’ll ever be again…
I watched this, and heard it’s brilliant, Neil Diamond-studded sound-track with my mother, who’s of the right vintage to remember it all, as though the 60 years between were just another LSD trip. She said she was moved, which is as sound a seal of approval as you’ll find, she’s been there, lived that time, time when a cigarette was your index finger and a maraschino 🍒 was the definition of ever so tacky decadence.
If you’ve not seen OUATIH yet, stop now/burn after reading, the next paragraph dramatically spoils the fun, but is a must-read once you’ve seen ‘OUATIH’.

And so we come to Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie, the wife of Roman Polanski, is a smiley feet-dangling side-show to Leo and Brad’s shenanigans. She is introduced as the unattainable love-interest, lusted after by blonde gods like Steve McQueen but faithful to her beloved Polanski. We are waiting for her to be brought into the Tarantino action, like a Thurman, to bathe the baddies in blood, but she remains protected, innocent, like a doodle daydream in the margins. Why? Does Leo really get the girl in the end? He’s invited into her house and seems pleased – but maybe it’s just because it brings him closer to getting that Polanski part he’s always dreamed of.
Tarantino has not only cut but changed what really happened in the end. Those of you who are 70, you already know the twist, you know who Sharon Tate was and how she, her unborn child and 4 other house guests were mercilessly murdered by the Manson cult members in what was labelled “the most horrific crime in modern history”, in Polanski’s own house. Why has Tarantino changed this? It feels right, it feels good, to see the evil doers go up in laughable flames, to feel the trauma averted, healed. The hippies are bad, but their evil is left at a superficial level, they are overcome, unlike the truth of the gory Manson murder. Tarantino explains, in his interview with Empire:

“I was just getting ready to do a deep dive, and all of a sudden I was just like, ‘Let me stop before I get started on this – do I really want to let the Manson family into my head, into my psyche? Do I really want to think about where they were all coming from?”
And so he didn’t. I wonder how Polanski feels, in his exile, maybe he is pleased to see the trauma erased, to see what might have happened in a better scenario, see the past rewritten. Or maybe he is angry at the near-farce of Tarantino’s horror, at the uncanny reimagining of his long-lost wife and unborn child.

Tarantino’s offering comes out with a couple of other films to mark the anniversary of Tate’s demonic murder. And for the first time her family have spoken out about it.

As someone going into the film without any idea who she was and how she died, I would have left it none the wiser, were it not for my mother filling me in. Now I do know, I find the absence of her death in the film a fitting memorial, leaving her spirit undisturbed, allowing it peace and safety, if not in reality, at least in the collective consciousness, which must surely be a good thing?

The other side of Florence

August 6, 2019August 6, 2019 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

As a student in Bologna I made a few trips to this capital of renaissance opulence, bobbing up for air in cool basilicas before plunging into palazzo after palazzo, packed closely with more art than I could chew in a lifetime, let alone a day, before sinking into a bowl of something starchy somewhere shady, off the deeply beaten tourist track that circles Brunelleschi’s egg-topped duomo.

Now in my 33rd July, I’m pleased to be back in Florence with a little more time. I recommend you give Florence at least 3 days – enough to let it introduce itself to you in its own time. I’m not one for these prescribed “36 hours in” tours, which tie you to your map and your intention on getting there, missing the joys of happenstance. Cities like Florence, with so much to see and eat everywhere, are designed to be eaten whole, from seed to peel.

My favourite quarter is on the other side if the river, L’Oltrano, across the river from the Uffizi and duomo , near the miles of box hedges in the Boboli gardens. Here, on the other side, is space and peace broken only by mouthwatering artisanal markets and brilliant buskers . Also, in seeming homage to the statue of Abundance (L’Abbondanza) that surveys this quarter from the top of the Boboli estate , there’s not a street or piazza without a place to feast on beef and udon-like ‘pici’, gnocchi, bean stew, wild boar and all manner of Tuscan treats, finished off with a basket of edifying almond-packed Cantuccini biscuits steeped in soul-affirming Vin Santo.

Where was I? Ah si si, the other side of Florence’s river Arno, bridged by the ancient, tourist-heavy jewellery arcade that is the Ponte Vecchio, joint equal with Venice’s Rialto, the most touristed bridge in Europe and possibly the world. As if by magic the tourist flow dissipates once you cross over, with the duomo behind you, as the Oltrarno’s network of clear streets welcomes you into its confidence.

Here you’ll find a couple of palazzos now turned into public museums and art collections, time capsules created by the 18th and 19th century aristocratic ‘grand’ tourists and later “cognoscenti”. Here you’ll also find the piazzas of Santas Spirito and Croce. The former is perhaps my favourite square in Florence. Its beauty is not it’s ornate medieval-renaissance architecture, that forms merely the stage – it’s the players: Florentines, students, immigrants, all milling about, lining the long steps outside the Basilica of Santo Spirito, letting the stirring of the busking dancers and musicians fan their ‘discorsi’ in the gently simmering dusk.

There’s a 15th century convent on this square that the Catholic church have obligingly allowed to become a lovely hotel, each room blessed with its own character and heavenly views over the city. There’s one with a bathroom that looks like there’s a romantic painting of the cathedral on the wall, until you realise it’s actually a window with the best view in Florence. I’ll never forget having a shower, looking out into this with the evening sun and breeze flowing through the window, mingling with the smell of gorgeously cheesy opera music wafting up from the Piazza below.

Hopelessly sentimental I know, but Italy does this to you, it’s very hard not to be lost in ‘sentimentalità’ here. I have a friend who is one of the rare breed of non-Italians who have managed to penetrate the impenetrable ancient world of the Florentine artisan. What I wouldn’t give to have a little garret in Piazza Santo Spirito and have a pastry and espresso under the trees before making my way to my cave-like workshop in a dusty side-street to work diligently and thoughtfully on an altar piece or a memorial stone of pietra dura, carving different stones into animals and crests and flowers before stopping for a beautifully simple lunch somewhere delicious and affordable

But back to reality and London frenzy we Londoners must go, thanking Italy for yet another beautiful city of art, love and of course, food. Here are some of the places I love in Florence. If you spot them, bene, if you don’t, bene, you will no doubt find your own treasures. The only thing I would recommend above all, is to stay in the converted covent in Piazza Santo Spirito, formerly known as Convent of the Sorelle Bandini (Bandini Sisters), now Hotel Palazzo Guadagni.

Review of Dunkirk

July 24, 2017 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

On leaving the cinema, I felt moved and a little seasick after 2 hours in Nolan’s stylishly be-washed version of the Dunkirk evacuation. Looking back, however, I do think he missed quite a few tricks. More sea and sky than man and action. And the dialogue? Sparse, garbled and inaudible. Tom Hardy’s aviator goggles will probably get the Oscar for looking up…Then down…Then up… Perplexed yet calm.

Branagh and Rylance get their teeth stuck in, no question, but the screenplay doesn’t give them so much as a tin of spam to chew on. Lank grey scenes lap the repetitive sinking-ship action, as each new batch of grey extras topple off the decks. One or two figures form a bond and are distinguished from the crowd with a few close ups, but we’re given little to latch on to.

The rich tapestry of Dunkirk stories that could have populated the shores of both France and Britain, are not here – The tales within and behind the queues for boats, the tales of heroism from the civilian seamen from other side, are carried solely in Mark Rylance’s father-son skiff team, splashes of colour in desperate need of background.

The scale of the recovery feat, termed ‘The Miracle of Dunkirk’, the sheer number of men and the relatively small number of tiny boats that ferried them all back, (over 300,000 men in only 700 brave boats, back and forth, in just over a week) did not come across, visually or mentally.

It would be interesting to ask the veteran rescuers if they think Nolan did the scale of their efforts justice. Perhaps they weren’t the focus he was after. But, of all the lenses he could have put over Dunkirk, it seems to me he chose a very obvious one and lost the chance to distinguish Dunkirk from other war films.

What was unique about Dunkirk and why it is now known as ‘The Miracle of Dunkirk’ was that it demonstrated human capacity for hope and fearless altruism, en masse, collectively. Not the old story, tired and tested in every war film – man saves men. This one could have been different – hundreds of ordinary people of various ages and both sexes, getting up and going, against all odds, for the greater good, at the last minute, together. Rylance’s civilian voice was good but it could never be broad enough to hold all that water. Nolan needed to scale up the message. It would have been a timely one.

Further reading

That said – Nolan’s Dunkirk has done a good job in whetting my appetite for Dunkirk, or at least what ended up in the editing room floor.

‘Dunkirk, the History behind the motion picture’

‘The Little Ships of Dunkirk’

‘The Little Ships’ (tale for your little ones not lucky enough to be able to sit on great-grand-parents’ knees, told from a girl’s perspective)

Love toucan

February 15, 2017February 21, 2017 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

14_wolfgang-tillmans-tukan-2010

Taking a closer look at this picture – I was surprised to find that there is no colour in the dazzlingly tropical toucan that isn’t also shared with it’s decidedly non-tropical, ephemeral surroundings.

The blue of the toucan’s eye socket makes the blue in the rim of the garden water pools more vivid. The orange glow of the toucan’s ‘eye shadow’ and beak somehow give the stale crusts in the tray below a tropical zest. The unimaginably white softness of the toucan’s neck and the warm sandy yellow round its lapels light up the cheap beige repetition of the tiled patio.

Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans’ exhibition at the Tate Modern opens today. With this toucan and other shots, Tillmans demonstrates his principle of creating an image and not just a photo.

Each ‘image’ is not simply a capturing of a fleeting moment for our attention. It combines both passive observation and choreography. The photographer, in the taking and the developing, has made a set of choices that we could not make with the naked eye. Wolfgang has cited colour as one of the elements which the photographer uses to steer our view.

And so it’s not just a portrait of a toucan, but also it’s an exercise in colour appreciation. Through it we realise that our appreciation of colour is subject to context.

This has the unexpected subconscious side-effect of cheering up my dreary afternoon loo-trip – the ‘CAUTION CLEANING IN PROGRESS!’ flip board sign outside the Ladies is somehow less exasperating, I’m actually rather uplifted by it’s harmony of yellow and red, like the cheeky curved smile of a toucan’s bill. Subject for the next Turner Prize 😉 ?

More Tillmans and toucans

See the Toucan in real life at the Tate

Watch the artist himself discuss his approach to photography

Endless Poetry is endlessly poetic

February 1, 2017February 3, 2017 ~ Bagriella ~ 1 Comment

Last Sunday was grey and empty until I found myself in the cinema, in the strange comfort of octogenarian Chilean directing legend Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest film, Endless Poetry.

I had bought my ticket on a whim – All I knew was that it was in Spanish, in Chile and might be a little weird and poetic, as the title suggested. What I got was the most eye-opening, jaw-dropping two hours and 8 minutes of 2017 so far, unless Jodorowsky’s sequel comes out this year…

And I’m so pleased, in these unsavoury times, that there are 4 more delicious courses I’ve yet to eat, that Endless Poetry is the second in a 5 part film cycle, that there’s The Dance of Reality and soon the other 4 will be ready…

Meantime, instead of giving away the menu of his surreal feast of a film, I’m going to list the thoughts that have fed me (not without a little indigestion) ever since…

…It doesn’t matter if it’s written on a wall or floorboard and no one but the poet will ever read it, everything disappears eventually; prayers are like poems, they are never seen but always needed by the prayer…

…Everything is beautiful, even and especially the mutations of normality…

…Anyone can walk in a straight line to anywhere they want to go; obstacles are illusions we can erase…

…Also, alongside linear there is cyclical, since maths is inexplicable; life is a cycle, returning to where it came from and filled with returns all along a direct way…

…Meantime Death is always there; suicide is blindness…

…Through misguided fear, we hide and make ourselves up like clowns.

… In reality, reality is up for grabs, and so we have nothing to hide and nothing to show…

…The naked soul and body are uplifting and captivating and no less so for being marked and scarred by the passage through life…

…We are all puppeteers and our puppets dance together. When we are holding our puppet-selves, our own identity is unclear and maybe this is because…

…We are connected to each other…

…That we are each exclusively in charge of ourselves is an illusion…

…In reality we are all in the same puppet show together and share manipulation mutually, all our limbs are up for grabs to the nearest puppeteer…

…And with this power, love is not in the keeping, it’s in the letting go, the negation of the urge to manipulate, the diffusion of our fixed idea, it’s acceptance – no interference, no orchestration; just the acknowledgement of a God in the other person, the godliness that is beyond perfection….

…The job of poetry is not to have to say it all like this, in a clumsy list, in so many words, but to say it in fewer and to trigger a response that lasts forever in the consciousness, which is universal, and endless.

The job of this film is to demonstrate poetry, in action, and indeed it accomplishes this almost impossible task, sometimes effortlessly, perhaps endlessly.

Muchas Gracias Mr Jodorowsky!

Wiki links worth looking up:

‘Endless Poetry‘

‘The Dance of reality‘

World’s best comic, written by the Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Holy Mountain, funded by John Lennon

Psychomagic psychotherapy, pioneered by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky about where he thinks things are heading

Interview with the FT and general overview of Alejandro Jodorowsky

King Lear: Glenda V Anthony

December 15, 2016December 15, 2016 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

king-lear-old-vic-643

And so out they come and stand in the spotlights to two rounds of standing ovations. I stand up to put my coat on and leave, no one will miss my feeble claps amid the din of whoop whoops.

What have I missed? Why does Glenda and her stellar crew leave me numb? There was nothing in this production that was any better, to me, than any of the productions I’ve ever seen. There was much that was was unnecessary at best; at worst, a smutty distraction from the glory of the text.

But this audience and no doubt the packed house watching tonight, lapped up every drop of mostly dreary, conveyor-belt delivery, washed down with large glasses of “shocking” nudity, loud “atmospheric” music and stark lighting that, from a purely practical perspective, made long tracks of the best scenes, however loudly throttled out, almost inaudible, let alone moving.

The best thing about it was the digital display overhanging the stage, telling us what act and scene we were on. I found myself looking at it more and more with that sinking feeling you get when the next bus isn’t for another 25 minutes, finding myself hoping there’d been a tech hitch and the final scene was already “due”.

In contrast, the Barbican’s Anthony Sher-led production was the triumph that critics should hail as one of the best since John Hurt and Timothy West,and, I’d say, better. But for Anthony and co, there was no standing ovation.

learbarbican

Why? Because it was a great tragedy. We should all be highly suspicious of any tragic play that leaves you with enough energy to get up afterwards, let alone smile, clap and chat to your neighbor about how good it all was, not least Glenda.

Sher and his troop, through 5 acts and almost 3 hours , truly suspended my disbelief. Not for a half line did I look up to see if the scene’s ticking was digitally indicated overhead. Not for a second did I think I am here watching a load of celeb actors reciting Shakespeare like it needed their help, another language peppered with the odd ‘top ten catchphrases of all time”.

No, unlike Deborah Warner’s Old Vic production, Gregory Doran’s Barbican show was life, on stage, and we were on it too, with the actors, just as Shakespeare intended. Every line had its own intrinsic timeless resonance, which was then expanded, sometimes creating new and unusual contexts, sometimes merely amplifying well-known interpretations, always keeping us hooked.

The bad characters were not all bad, the good characters were not all good, there was nuance. All parts had their nuances and got subtle treatment, whereas it seemed at the Old Vic that all the characters dangled off Glenda’s Lear like annoyingly obnoxious puppets she had grown bored of or lost the skill to move. To Warner’s credit, perhaps that was the point?

The props and scenery at the Barbican worked to evoke a sense of the play’s contexts, amplifying subtly, never clumsily varnished on for ‘effect’, always using and trusting the weight of voice and text. I won’t say how or carry on with any comparisons. Anyone who sees it should come at it fresh. You’ll leave utterly drained yet uplifted.

The Barbican’s production was the best I’ve ever seen, the Old Vic’s one of the worst. But that’s just me and most may disagree, I’d just say, ignore the media hype around Glenda and take advantage of the fact Sher’s reigns on at the Barbican until 23rd December

What makes a portrait great?

July 18, 2016July 18, 2016 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

Photographs capture a moment in time. In exchange for the depth and truth of this one moment, photographs risk loosing the whole truth of all the other moments that have brought it to the viewer.

Saint-Exupéry, in The Little Prince, says ‘What is essential is not seen’. A great portrait can be entirely abstract or ‘warts and all’; the final goal should never be to get a visual likeness, but to take us to unseen dimensions, beyond the skin.

A bad portrait can be replaced by a photograph. A great portrait layers experience over appearance, to conjure up something that’s part of time and yet beyond it.

Many of the portraits in this year’s exhibition pointed towards this extra dimension.

The National Portrait Gallery’s 2016 BP Portrait Award runs until September

Recommended reading

‘Diversion’ by Charlie Masson, oil on board, shown above

The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupéry

The origin of the phrase ‘warts and all‘

Written by women for all Mankind

January 10, 2016October 24, 2016 ~ Bagriella ~ 3 Comments

womankind6_small-cover-800x1048

Last Sunday I was about to get on the tube for 1.5 hours and needed something to read that wasn’t the news. Upton Park Newsagents had run out of all women’s mags except one. Womankind. A new magazine that is currently running it’s 5th issue.

Why the magazine should find itself here, in the home of West Ham football, amidst a sea of random, male – oriented periodicals is anyone’s guess. It’s the only magazine I’ve ever paid £5.99 for and don’t regret a single penny. It kept my attention from cover to cover, every single page, and there are 129 of them, no ads.

It covers so much in such a consistently considered and beautifully laid out way. Be you man or woman, it’s choc full of mind-treats – from the great art of the world, the opportunity to expand life beyond the daily grind, the latest on the workings of the brain and the pleasure taken in a nice picture of a bird with a bit of info you didn’t know and weren’t searching for but feel better and wiser for having absorbed…

womankindmag.com

My works and days

Reviewing and observing life passing through London and elsewhere

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